manslaughter, or justifiable homicide. In making these distinctions the state has struck a blow at that older code of the blood-feud in which the right of vengeance belonged entirely to the family of the murdered man. According to that code, as we cannot but conclude from Homer, nothing but the fact of the violent death of a relative was considered, not the character or motive of the deed itself. Now, however, the murderer is liable to a death penalty which he can avoid before the verdict is given by going into voluntary and perpetual exile. He disappears and leaves the country--at the boundaries of the country the state's authority ceases, and so does the power of the indignant spirit of the dead, which is bound to its native soil--like that of all local deities, whose influence is confined to the place where they are worshipped. If, by such flight over the frontier, "the doer of the deed withdraws himself from the person injured by him--i.e. the angry soul of the dead man"[149\5]--his life is thereby saved, even if he himself is not justified. This alone is meant by the permission of such voluntary exile. Involuntary homicide[150\5] is punished by banishment for a limited period, after the expiration of which the relations of the dead man are to grant a pardon to the murderer on his return to his native land.[151\5] If they voted for it unanimously[152\5] they could even do this before he went into banishment, in which case this would not take place at all. There can be no doubt that this pardon had to be granted by them in the name of the dead man as well, of whose rights they were the representatives; indeed, the man himself lying mortally wounded could before his death, even in the case of wilful murder, pardon his assailant and thereby excuse his relatives the duty of prosecution;[153\5] to such an extent was the injured soul's wish for vengeance the only point at issue, {178} even in the legal procedure of a constitutionally governed state, and not in the least the lawless act of the murderer as such. When there is no desire for vengeance on the part of the victim requiring to be satisfied, the murderer goes unpunished. When he suffers punishment, he suffers it for the satisfaction of the soul of the murdered man. He is no longer slain as a sacrifice to his victim; but when the relations of the dead exact vengeance from him by legally constituted processes, that, too, is a part of the cult offered to the soul of the dead. § 2